Posts and electronic services go hand-in-hand
Some 150 people attended a conference on the postal sector and the information society, organized on Friday 8 June at UPU headquarters in Berne.
E-Commerce development, Internet security, identity authentication, delivery of merchandise bought online, protection of personal data, and partnerships to be explored were among the many topics discussed during the conference organized by the UPU in cooperation with the International Telecom-munications Union. The discussions brought to light many opportunities and issues facing companies that have gone the e-business route and for which the postal sector, with the help of the UPU, could bring solutions through more standardization as well as improvements to quality of service and security.
In their presentations, the Canadian, Tunisian, Italian and Korean Posts showed how they used new technologies to develop innovative services that responded to customers’ needs. For example, the Korean Post has developed systems such as PostNet to better manage its mail operations and ePost to facilitate Internet access through post offices. With the creation of its electronic bank, today close to 67% of all postal financial transactions are electronic. The Korean Post now wants to become ubiquitous thanks to its u-Post project, which relies on radio-frequency identification technology.
eBay International explained how the company maintains a very close relationship with postal services for the delivery of merchandise bought on eBay sites, while Ernst & Young talked about the evolution of cyberspace security and improvements made to better protect electronic data.
The UPU organized the conference to renew the debate regarding the postal sector’s role in the information society, following its active participation in the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis. Indeed, through its vast network of post offices worldwide, the postal sector’s role in the information society was recognized and the UPU was designated to assist other international organizations in developing global E-Commerce, one of the WSIS action lines.
